Commentary on Australian and world events from a socialist and democratic viewpoint

10000

Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram has just put up the 10000th post. Checking my own stats, I’ve put up over 5000 posts, and the site has had more than 150 000 comments (not counting spam). Go over to CT and say Hi!

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9 thoughts on “10000”

The easily accessible archival nature of “blogs” is a great asset to discourse in a democracy.

The establishment media loathes such scrutiny of itself, but is one of the reasons they are suffering increasing irrelevance.

The net is at an age where it is easy to look back over the last decade and sample all sorts of viewpoints on a wide variety of subjects.

As a single example: Peak Oil. As far as I’m aware nobody seriously argues now that the production of conventional oil didn’t peak around about 2005 – but by looking back at old posts from any number of sites one can easily find furious arguments and vitriol around the very suggestion that any such thing could happen.

The really interesting and more relevant graphs would be per capita energy use for all uses and world GDP or income per energy unit. It will show improvements in both but the so-called disconnect between energy and GDP cannot happen. We can get more efficient but there are limits to efficiency.

STEEN, B. & BORG, G. 2002. An estimation of the cost of sustainable production of metal concentrates from the earth’s crust. Ecological Economics, 42, 401-413.

All this is basic ecological economics which the neoclassicals and other mainstream economists seem to ignore of the basis that:

1. there will always be new resources to tap into like the ocean bottom or the moon (or should that be blue sky)

2. there will always be substitutes (which require R&D investments at a time when science and technology which has subsidized material progress for decades is now being gutted)

3. we can always recycle (which isn’t that cheap or cost effective in many instances).

4. exponential growth can go on forever with no penalty (forgetting the destruction of natural fisheries for example).

5. there are no externalities adding significant costs and in the case of Climate Change CERN is part of a conspiracy to hide from us that the Sun is cooling so we need to burn more coal to keep warn – according to Maurice Newman – just guessing but this sounds like it could relate to the old problem of a ‘deficit’ of solar neutrinos which has now been solved with good science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrinoshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrino_problem.

@Newtownian
The paper by Lundin is a particularly good one. Hermit will be interested to note that Lundin endorses the figure of around 8 as a minimum EROEI ‘threshold’ for civilisation (which I recall is the figure Hermit also prefers).